That’s how a BBC headline broke the news that authors Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer were denied entry to the country that gave the world the Magna Carta.

“Blogger,” you see, is an insinuating term. Not quite a term of abuse, but still a word that imparts diminishment. Who are you going to believe, asked Dan Rather when questioned about his — as it turned out, fraudulent — story about George W. Bush’s military service: me, Dan Rather of CBS, or some blogger sitting in front of his computer in his pajamas?

Good question, Dan! Why don’t you think about that in your ignominious retirement and get back to us — or, on second thought, don’t get back to us. Just think about what a preening fool you made of yourself before even CBS had had enough and cashiered you.

Geller and Spencer are both, in different ways, prominent critics of Islamism — i.e., of that strong current of militant Islam that seeks to spread the intolerant ideology of Islam in the West through the imposition of sharia in Western countries. You might agree with their views, and then again, you might not.

That’s hardly the point, is it?

A spokesman for the Home Office welcomed the ban on Geller and Spencer, explaining: “The UK should never become a stage for inflammatory speakers who promote hate.” Hmm — “who promote hate.” Query: do Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer “promote hate”? Or is that just a rhetorical epithet employed by ideologues bent on advancing a certain politically correct agenda in order to stifle criticism? (Another question: what is a “hate crime”? Is a crime more of a crime because it was committed by someone who dislikes the victim? Or is it like the term “social justice,” a piece of rhetorical legerdemain intended to lend gravity to a noun by the act of prefacing an emotionally charged but irrelevant adjective?)

The point is that the metabolism of liberal democracy depends upon the free exchange of ideas, which means, in part, a vigorous circulation of competing ideas. No less a figure than John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, pointed out: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” There is plenty to criticize in Mill, heaven knows (and I’ve done my bit to criticize him), but he was surely right that liberal democracy depends in part upon fostering the “collision” of competing ideas.

The irony of the situation is rich. Geller and Spencer speak out against the intolerance of Islam. Got that? They speak. They lecture. They write books. Spencer’s written a shelf of them. Geller was behind a campaign to place “defeat jihad” posters in New York subways. One of the reasons they were traveling to the UK was to participate in a commemorative ceremony for Drummer Lee Rigby. Remember him? He was the chap who, last month, was walking down a street in Woolwich when two Muslims ran him down in a car and then stabbed and hacked him to death with knives and a cleaver. Like the Earl of Strafford, their motto was “thorough.” When these partisans of the religion of peace got through with him, he had to be identified by dental records.

Geller and Spencer are denied entry to the UK. Quoth a government spokesman: individuals whose presence “is not conducive to the public good” may be denied entry by the Home secretary. He explained: “We condemn all those whose behaviours and views run counter to our shared values and will not stand for extremism in any form.”

That pretty much covers the waterfront, doesn’t it? Disagree with me and I’ll have you named an enemy of the state.

Read this article again and imagine that the accusations directed against Geller and Spencer were instead directed against Islamofascists, and especially against those who have perpetrated acts of violence against the public.

None of what Geller and Spencer have been accused of makes any sense when applied to them, but would make perfect and complete sense if applied to the islamofascists they oppose.

The chattering and governing classes in the UK are suffering from a collective case of Stockholm syndrome.

I'd compare them to Chamerblain, but I think that would be unfair to him.

While the Home Office banned them for all the wrong reasons, its turned out to be a blessing in disguise for British counter-jihad. After Geller and Spencer's vitriolic assault on one of Britain's pre-eminent counter-jihadis Melanie Phillips merely for not endorsing their support of the EDL (while giving unqualified support to their right to enter Britain and lauding Mr Spencer's scholarship!!), they can only do discredit to the cause of counter-jihad. If they come to Britain in support of the EDL, they'll be advancing the cause of fascism, not counter-jihad.

I thought he was joking until I read the article. This will be the US in a few years. People like that special witness vote and someone elected Obama. It will get worse and we can't change the situation. I hate to see this country become a third world country. I hate to think that family who come after me may decide it is pointless to work to support the underclass.

More CCTV surveillance than any other European nation, no rights for business owners to refuse to deal with customers, no response from the police when the object of the complaint is a member of an ethnic minority, arrests of Christian street preachers, Islamistsz allowed to burn poppies used for remembrance of war dead but any objection to islamists hammered down b the police. Geller and Spencer were lucky to be denied access. Some of us would love to escape.

Britain has been in decline since socialized healthcare was implemented just after WWII. The left used what remained of wartime measures to begin their "march through the institutions" and succeeded in transforming the country probably even more thoroughly than even they expected they would. Sound familiar?

They can ban me anytime. I'll vacation and spend my bucks in North America. What the hell happened to England? Is it in the water they drink?Listen, we who are right need to breed, and I did! The one saving grace thanks to God is that progressives don't seem to replace themselves.

I agree with those who say the US is not far behind. Neither is Israel. In fact, most of the Israeli elites (or all of them, depending on definition), insist on the denial of the threat posed by some Muslim Israelis, Arabic speakers.

I am not surprised at the ban. Spencer and Geller take Islam by the throat. Spencer does it with his intellectual pieces on Islam, backed by knowledge and talent of expression; Geller does it with her blog and with the anti-lawfare lawfare. I will bet the British paid attention to the attempt by Toronto-area police, infused with Islamic awareness, to block her from speaking there.

We are to coexist with an ideology that does not suffer any of us. We are to tolerate the intolerant and, largely, the intolerable. We are to turn on each other and live with the nagging sub-awareness of this non-war war. We are not to fight against Islam. Our elites demand it. And we are to do this when, as in the case of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton (richly illustrated by Michael Walsh), those issuing our marching orders are themselves bad to the bone.